Communications for the rest: Rowe and the Mesh Potato

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 14 April 2010 13:39

Business IT - Open Source

David Rowe stands out from the average free and open source software person in at least two respects: he has done remarkable things with both software and hardware and despite this he is a very modest, low-key person.

It is fair to describe him as one of many unheralded Australians who does sterling work but is overshadowed by the many empty vessels who make a huge sound.

Rowe is involved in several projects, one of them being an outfit called The Village Telco, which is trying to provide communications to the African continent using open source telephony software and hardware. The project is sponsored by The Shuttleworth Foundation.

He is also involved in a free telephony project using similar components, building a network in East Timor, and developing an open source low bitrate speech codec.

For him, following a career in technology is something like a duck taking to water. "(I) crawled towards power points at 9 months, (and) was allowed to play with an extension cord as a reward for toilet training." he told iTWire in a recent interview.

Rowe was building torches at four, soldering electronic gadgets at nine ("some of them even worked," he says), and had a HAM radio licence at 13. He was programming BASIC and assembler on early Z-80 machines at 14 in the early 80s.

"I am primarily an electronics/communications guy, but that means programming and computing these days," Rowe says. "I remember reading about computers and programming in late 70s magazines like Electronics Australia (EA) and Electronics Today International (ETI). I drifted into computers in my teenage years, radio was my first interest."

He studied engineering to the doctorate level at the University of South Australia. Like many of his other achievements, he doesn't make much of this.